Graham Greene by The Spy's Bedside Book

imagination and to our fear, we are slow to reckon with that truth or to admit it. I set it down that I knew from the first instant of inspection the whole meaning of that which the French contemplated against my country—there, seven miles from Calais upon the Paris road. But to claim that I realised the moment of it, or would embrace the knowledge in my innermost mind,would be to boast a prescience I have no title to. Excited if you will, driven to a varicosity which defies any measure, telling myself that I should never live again such an hour as this, I followed the man to the tunnel’s mouth; I watched him kindle a flare at another a workman held; I heard his odd exclamations, that racking laugh which no other in all the world ever laughed so ill. If my life had been the stake, I must go on. Curiosity drove me now as with a lash. I neither reasoned nor apologised, for a voice within me said, You shall see.
    Jeffery raised the flare and stood an instant at the very mouth of the tunnel. The waving, ugly light displayed a face hard-set as in some exciting memory. Again he looked at me as he had looked when I met him on the road to Paris.
    â€œSonny, ever been in a tunnel before?”
    â€œOnce, a Metropolitan tunnel.”
    â€œNasty, eh?”
    â€œWell, it wasn’t pleasant.”
    â€œAh, but you had the dry land above you there. You were never under the sea, I suppose?”
    â€œNot farther than any decent swimmer goes.”
    â€œSo! We’ll take you deeper down than that. Come on, my boy. It does me good to hear you.”
    He entered the tunnel upon this and began to walk very quickly, while I, when we had left the last of the daylight behind us, stumbled after him with all a newcomer’s ungainliness. Such a glare as his torch cast showed me the polished rails of steel, the circular roof above us already blackened by the smoke of engines; but the track I scarcely saw, and tripped often to his amusement.
    â€œMiss your eyes, eh, Captain? Well, you’ve got to pay your footing. Listen to the music—it’s a train going home to tea. You’d better step in here, my lad—we can’t afford to waste your precious life like that. Do you know you’re standing in whatought to be the four-foot-six, but isn’t? Come out of it, come out of it.”
    He pulled me from the track to a manhole in the wall, and crouching there together we watched the engine go clattering by, all the roof of the tunnel incarnadined with the glowing iridescence of the crimson light, the very faces of the workmen standing out white and clear in the glow which the torch cast upward. But the tunnel seemed shaken to its very marrow, and the quivering earth, which held the steel, appeared to live while the trucks rolled over it. Again, as often before, I realised the majesty of the engineer’s life; nevertheless, the greater question rang unceasingly in my ears, Why had I been seduced to this place? What did the French Government want with a tunnel beneath the sea seven miles from Calais harbour? God is my witness that I did not dare to answer myself—did not dare until many hours, nay, days were lived and I could doubt the truth no longer.
    We had come by this time a mile at the least, as I judged it, from the tunnel’s mouth, and must be very near to the sea, if not actually beneath it. By here and there upon our way we passed a soldier patrolling, lantern in hand, a section of the tunnel; and once, when we had gone on again a quarter of a mile, we found a great bricked shaft, at the foot of which men were hauling sleepers and steel rails by the light of a coal fire and many flares set about it. The picture was rude and wild; the faces of the men shaped pale and hard-set wherever the light fell upon them; the environing darkness, so complete, so unbroken, suggested the mouth of some vast, unfathomable pit; whereunto all this burden of steel and wood was cast; wherefrom these